Sarah Sutton, a life lived out on the Row

There are no pictures of Sarah Sutton, nor to my knowledge has she left a diary, or anything which might tell me about her life.

She was born in 1821 in Withington and lived with her husband in a wattle and daub cottage on the Row*. She died in the same cottage 70 years later. Her husband Samuel was a farm labourer which was about what most people did here in Chorlton in the first five decades of the 19th century.

Sutton's Cottage 1892

Unlike the wives of the well to do or even some of the farming families she had no servants to help her.

In the spring of 1851 she had two children under the age of eight, was married to a labourer and had the added responsibility of an infirm father in law.

So tracking her working day is a good start to understanding the daily routines of running a house.

Keeping a wattle and daub cottage clean was no easy task. Plaster walls tended to crumble, the roof of thatch could be home to vermin, and the stone or brick floors were damp and in need of constant sweeping.

The interior will have been similar to these pictures from a one up one down brck cottage which stood on Maitland avenue until the 1930s.

Her day would begin at six in the summer and not much later in the winter months. One of the first chores was the collection of water. This might come from a well or the pump in the Bailey farm yard opposite. She may also have used the fish pond on the Row, which was next to her cottage. In having a supply so close Sarah was lucky, for other people on the Row the regular daily journey back with a bucket of water would be a much longer journey. And this simple task would be mirrored across the township and beyond.

Downstairs room Maitland Cottage circa 1930

Water was needed for cooking drinking and washing and there would be a number of journeys to collect it. 

The next task of the day would have been laying and lighting the fire. This may have used wood or possibly coal. 

But traditional wattle and daub fire places were large and not suited for burning coal which needs a smaller fire place and an efficient flu to draw the flame. The compromise was to reduce the size of the fire place which would allow the use of coal now readily available from the Duke’s Canal.

The move from wood to coal may have been underway during the 1850s and while no one was selling the fuel in the township in 1851 there were a number of coal dealers recorded a decade later.

Once the fire had been made and breakfast served, there were beds to be aired, plates washed and the floor swept. Rugs and mats were taken out and banged against the wall, and even before the floor was swept and scrubbed in damp weather the stone flags had to be scrapped with a an old knife blade to loosen the trodden in mud.

But this simple task could only be done after Samuel had gone off to work and her son John who was seven to school. This left baby Ann who was just one and would have required frequent attention. It is likely that Sarah could have relied on one of her neighbours living in the same row. The midday meal needed preparing and if her husband was working too far away his meal would have either been prepared before he left or taken out to him which might have fallen to her son John.

Downstairs room Maitland Cottage showing boxed staircase circa 1930

Most rural families like the Suttons had a diet heavily based on vegetables. 

Some of these were available from the cottage garden, including the all important cabbages and potatoes as well as onions, carrots, parsnips and broad beans.

They were lucky enough to have an orchard behind their home and there may have been opportunities to collect some of the windfall.

 And like many cottage gardens there were also currant and gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes and rhubarb. Gooseberries were ready by June and were popular in the north where there were competitions and societies.

Sarah would also have grown some flowers and one that has survived and still grows on the site of her cottage is greater celandine. It has beautiful yellow flowers and like many that Sarah and others would have grown also had medical properties. Greater celandine is toxic but according to various sources in the right doses can be used for therapeutic uses. She may well have used it as a mild sedative to treat asthma, bronchitis and whooping cough along with other complaints including warts. But it is toxic nature and so not one to try at home.

It still grows on the site at the corner of Wilton and Beech Roads and may be one of the last survivors of our cottage gardens. My botanist fried David Bishop spotted it some time ago and wrote about on his blog.


In the back garden there may have been an area reserved for keeping chickens. Eggs could be expensive and keeping chickens not only avoided having to buy them but could be a small extra form of revenue. So in

1851 the price of a dozen eggs ranged from 4d [2p] in the summer to 8d [4p] later in the year. The family pig was another means of supplementing the family diet and might provide meat for up to seven months. It would be bought in the spring from a local farmer who might wait to the animal was killed and the meat sold before receiving payment in the autumn. This was the only way that some families could afford the cost of a pig which might be between 20s and 25s [£1-£2.25p].

Site of Sutton's Cottage, 2010

But it is unlikely that all their needs could be met from what they grew. Much research has shown that at best the garden supplemented the food they bought. But some might be gathered for free.

There were many wild fruits and plants across the township for the collecting. Wine might be made from a variety of flowers as well as fruit and for those who knew where to look there were rich sources of plants which could enhance cooked dishes.

Pictures; Sutton’s Cottage circa 1892, photograph from the Wesleyan Souvenir Handbook of 1895  and interior of the cottage on Maitland Avenue in the collection of Philip Lloyd, the site today of the cottage on the corner of Beech Road and Wilton Road, from the collection of Andrew Simpson


*The Row is now Beech Road

With The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in Belleville, Ontario in 1945

Arriving Home, 1945 

Here are three of those images that pretty much speak for themselves.  

We are in Belleville in Ontario in the autumn of 1945 watching the home coming of The Hastings and Prince Edward  Regiment.

They had shipped out for Europe in the December of 1939, saw action in France in June 1940 and were part of the allied landings in Sicily and mainland Italy in 1943.  In the final months of the war they moved to North West Europe

Marching through familiar streets, 1945

Meanwhile back in Canada in June 1945, a second Battalion of the regiment was mobilized for service in the Pacific but with Japan’s surrender in the August the battalion was disbanded in the November.

Each photograph is a rich source of detail, from the informality of the disembarkation at the railway station to the formal march past.

So often the identities of the people in the pictures are lost but the second soldier in the parade was the Inetelligence Officer Farley Mowatt.

Pictures; by Mike Dufresne, posted on the facebook site, Vintage Belleville, Trenton & Quinte Region

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vintage-Belleville-Trenton-Quinte-Region/395830067158776

A name …… some reports ...... a heap of friends ...... and the memories …… Crown Woods ..... 1966-68

Just what survives from our school days is a lottery.

It’s usually a mix of luck, self-interest, and our parent’s determination to save something of our childhood.

Me …….. I have just five school photos from my days at Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern, nothing from my Junior School and little from my time at Crown Woods.

 And I guess it’s the absence of much from Crown Woods that irks me the most given that they were the happiest of my school days.

Just why they were lost is still a puzzle, but I have rediscovered the reports from our Stella.

All five of us went through its doors, from September 1966 when I was 16 and new to the Sixth Form to my four sisters who attended in the late 60s into the next decade.

The reports span the winter and summer of 1970/1971 and are fascinating on many levels.

First of course they remind me of our sister and that in itself is a bonus.

But then there is the school badge and the names of the teachers including Mrs. Husain who was my first tutor and head of History but who had become a deputy head by 1971.

And there is the style of reporting which I recognise so well from my 35 years of teaching.

Some of the comments are spot on, others very subject specific and some vague and generalized.

All of which I can vouch for over the decades in what I struggled to write about my students, running from the supportive, constructive to the diplomatically critical.

“Always remember” I told myself that “this is a person, not a number on a register who should always be treated with respect”, unlike one poor soul who a colleague of mine in the 1970s summed up as “feeble”, no more no less.

But reports are not all of what lingers with most of us.  For me it is the friends I made, and who I still talk to today fifty-eight years after I met them along witha heap of memories which range from the good to the indifferent and the bad.

In there I include some girlfriends, some impressive teachers and the drama and musical evenings which still live with me.

And now I read that the successor to the Crown Woods I knew is discussing changing the school’s name.

Am I sad? Well, a little, but then the building I knew has already been demolished and it is over half a century ago that I went there.

Added to which of the seven educational institutions I studied at and taught in, only one has survived, and that was Edmund Waller in New Cross. The rest from my secondary school to Crown Woods, the places I did a degree and obtained a Cert Ed along with the schools I taught at ... all have gone. Some are now apartments, or housing estates while one changed its name, was then demolished and is now an academy with a new name.

So, not much to show for the biggest part of my life as a student and teacher.  Still to misquote Rick Baine from the film Casablanca we will always have the memories.*

Location; Eltham

Pictures; report for Stella Simpson, 1971 in the Simpson collection

*“We will always have Paris” Rick Baine, Casablanca, 1942

Let me tell you sad stories of the death of theatres ...... Manchester's Theatre Royal

There will be those who recognise the mangled link to Shakespeare, * and that is all to the good given that this is the story of our own Theatre Royal on Peter’s Street and the statue of the man himself which stands above the entrance.

Closed for business, the Theatre Royal, 2024

It opened in 1845 and can claim to be the oldest surviving theatre in the city.

That said it closed its doors in 1921 and since then has been a cinema, a bingo hall and even a night club.

My 1850 copy of the Stranger’s Guide to Manchester offers up that it could “hold 2,147 people and on the roof, there is a large reservoir capable of holding 20,000 gallons of water in the event of a fire….”**

And it was here sometime in 1970 that I saw the film Woodstock which documented the famous music festival the previous year.

All you ever wanted to know, 2026

I can’t remember too much of what I saw and even less of the theatre.  Nor if I am honest, have I given it much of a glance over the years as I whizz down Peter’s Street.

All of which changed recently after a visit to a new exhibition at Central Ref which explores the links between Shakespeare and the city.  It is simply entitled Shakespeare and Manchester: A Victorian Powerhouse Exhibition and runs through till May 30th.

That said there is nothing simple about the story which encompasses the American actor, Ira Alridge along with “local businessman John Knowles who commissioned the Theatre, actor-manager Charles Calvert and Rosa Grindon who forged a career as the Victorian age’s leading female Shakesperean scholar” and crosses the Atlantic to America.

The Theatre Royal mode, 2026

Of all the bits on display I was drawn to a model of the Theatre Royal which has its own story.  It comes from Derby Museum and dates possibly from the 1960s.

And as someone who spent his summer holidays out of London visiting my grandparents in Derby that museum was a tad special.  A decade earlier I spent heaps of time mesmerized by a giant model railway which took up a large area of the museum.  Alas the Theatre Royal did not arrive in Derby until long after I had stopped visiting, but it was still a sort of connection.

I could say more but then that would spoil a trip to Shakespeare and Manchester: A Victorian Powerhouse Exhibition so I won’t.

Mr. Shakespeare and that model of the Theatre Royal, 2026

Suffice to say there is lots to see.

For more details please contact:

r. Ian Nickson. Honorary Research Fellow, University of Manchester, ian.nickson-2@manchester.ac.uk

Kattie Kincaid, Project Lead for the Shakespearean Garden,  kattiekincaid@hotmail.com

Location; Manchester Central Library, St Peter's Square, Manchester, M2 5PD

Pictures; Mr. Shakespeare at the Theatre Royal, 2024, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and remaining images from Shakespeare and Manchester: A Victorian Powerhouse Exhibition, 2026, courtesy of Ian Nickson

*let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the death of kings" , Richard II, Act 3 Scene 2, William Shakespeare 1592

**Duffield, H.G The Strangers Guide to Manchester, 1850

Mrs Jane Redford, Manchester's second woman councillor

I have been staring at this picture for some time.

It was taken on October 7th 1911 at the opening of Chorltonville, and somewhere amongst the worthies is Mrs Jane Redford.

She had been born in 1849 so we are looking for a woman aged 62 which narrows the search a little.

She is there because she was one of our elected city councillors having been elected the year before and in the way that these things work she was about to contest the seat again in the November.

So perhaps this was not so much civic duty as another one of the many public engagements that fall to a politician about to fight an election.

But this is perhaps to do Mrs Jane Redford a disservice. She had been active for over 30 years serving on various public bodies including the Board of Henshaw’s Blind Asylum and as a Poor Law Guardian for the Chorlton Union where she had campaigned for the provision of trained nurses for workhouse hospitals. All too often the workhouse authorities had relied on old and illiterate inmates to tend the sick.

Important as these contributions were it is her role as a city councillor which is more significant because her election in 1910 made her just the second woman to be elected to the council.

What is in some ways more remarkable is that she was not a member of the main political parties and seems to have had little in the way of an organisation behind her.

She described herself as a Progressive Candidate which had less to do with radical politics and more to do with all fashioned rate payer concerns.

Her predecessor Harry Kemp had campaigned as a progressive on the platform of advancing “good government” which involved “exercising a rigorous protest against extravagance” and “preserving as far as possible the residential character” of Chorlton.

But, and here is the interesting thing it came with a progressive take on the need for “adequate Schools, Libraries, Open Spaces, Public Baths and everything which counts for the better health and morality of the people”

And Mrs Redford echoed this in her own election address of 1911 which highlighted her record on the Education, Libraries and Sanitary Committees along with a degree of success in checking “the building of houses on the Chorlton side [of Longford Park] in order that Chorlton people may have easy access to this new park.”

It is also there in her concerns over the Carnegie grant to build a new library which she felt should have been delivered “through the ordinary means of municipal enterprise.”

Now the normal rate payer position and certainly that of her fellow Chorlton councillors along with Alderman Fletcher Moss was “for acceptance of the gift,” which perhaps marks her out as more than just a guardian of careful council spending.

And in turn points back to her wider concerns for the welfare of people.


She argued strongly that the Education Committee should experiment with vocational training and in particular training girls for domestic service which “was of all the occupations for girls that which was not overcrowded and so [they would be able to] enter service at once and claim a proper wage, instead of commencing work and gaining a precarious livelihood by cleaning steps.”


Of course it is easy to be cynical about the role of vocational education and I for one spent years arguing the need for a well balanced curriculum for young people which didn’t just push them into manual work without offering them the opportunity of a broad and challenging set of subjects.

And this seems to have been what motivated her, because while advocating the pilot scheme to train young girls she was keen that the Education Committee work with the Post Office to widen the career prospects of telegraph boys, who “were only engaged for a certain number of years as messenger carriers and when they had to find work other than that of a purely causal character the task was not a very easy one” 

The plan was provide “two or three hours instruction each day, so that when their career as telegraph boys ceased they might be better equipped to secure other and perhaps more lucrative appointments.”


Now I think it might be fair to argue that she did not embrace a clear political position which might mark off from say the vision of the new Labour Party but likewise this was no conventional rate payer politician. She had expressed her growing concern at the lack of school provision both here in Chorlton and across the city and was very active in the movement for women’s health.

There is more to find out about Mrs Redford and also stories to tell of other women who campaigned in their trade unions and local Labour Party branches for the vote, improved social conditions and a better deal for ordinary people but they are for later.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchetser

Pictures; The opening ceremony of Chorltonville, from the Lloyd collection, picture of Mrs Jane Redford from her election address by kind permission of Lawrence Beadle


References; Manchester Guardian, Harry Kemp and Jane Redford's election addresses.

The sandwich board ............ a century apart

Advertising the Palace Theatre, 1896

Once the man with a sandwich board was a common site on the streets of all our towns and cities.

And then sometime after the last world war they seemed to disappear.

I guess it was part of that more slick way of advertising which relied on TV to get the message over.

But they are back usually advertising fast food and can be seen following the main routes into the city or as in this case at St Mary’s Gate close to St Ann’s Square.

Some firms have gone that step forward and produced a sign which mimics the product.

And like their predecessors a century ago they walk the streets in all weathers, come rain, hail or sun.

Fast food, 2015

Back in 1896 Henry Tidmarsh recorded what he saw on the streets of Manchester.  In all he produced over 300 illustrations for the book Manchester Old and New.

It was published in 1894 by Cassell with a text by William Arthur Shaw and told the history of the city but the real value of the book was in Tidmarsh's vivid depictions of Manchester, with streets and buildings animated with people.

Location; Manchester




Pictures; At St Mary’s Gate, 2015, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and by St Peter’s Church, 1896, Henry Tidmarsh, from Manchester Old and New, William Arthur Shaw, 1896

When Crown Woods went vinyl ………………..

I will always be grateful to Crown Woods.

Being 16 and turning up at Crown Woods, 1968

It took a raw sixteen-year-old newly arrived in the September of 1966 and offered up an exciting new world.

My previous five years had been spent at a secondary modern school in New Cross which was the end result for all of us who failed the eleven plus and were judged academically unsuited to the world of Shakespeare, John Donne, and Shelley.

To be fair many secondary moderns did punch above their weight, put students through O and A levels and suggested some of us could walk the hallowed corridors of universities.

That said I had an indifferent five years and was ready for Crown Woods.

And what a revelation it proved to be, from the teachers to the assumption that we would get involved in the drama, and musical productions, while encouraging us to cross the city in search of plays and films just because they were being performed.

crown woods at southwark, 1966

These jaunts included nights at the Old Vic, and Joan Littlewood’s theatre in Stratford as well as tiny amateur presentations of the classics in small smelly venues over the River in obscure parts of north London.

Musical night, 1966

All of which complimented the big inhouse drama productions from the Price of Coal, Crown Woods at Southwark, heaps of music nights and the small intimate evenings hosted by the English Department.

Over the years I have written about those experiences but until yesterday I wasn’t aware that Crown Woods had gone vinyl.*

It was in 1978 and consisted of selections from a series of concerts performed in 1977/78 school year, and the magic is the variety.

Crown Woods went vinyl, 1978

From the classics to items from popular musicals and jazz, and as befitted a comprehensive school the participants were drawn from all age groups.

The magic was in the variety, 1978

My only regret is that I wasn’t there although there will be people who remember those three magic nights and my have participated in one of the concerts. 

But by 1977, I was doing my bit for education in an inner-city Manchester school trying to emulate the spirt of Crown Woods.

That said I came across a copy on ebay for sale at £24.**

It is listed as "CROWN WOODS SCHOOL IN CONCERT   L.P.  EXCELLENT CONDITION. CATALOGUE NUMBER:  SPS130

This brilliant album by Crown Woods was released on a private pressing back in 1979. This copy is in great condition (as described above).  Along with some truly timeless music it has a great sleeve!  RARE !!"

Now I am intrigued that it was a private pressing, and wonder just how many were made.

I am tempted to make a bid but that would involve repairing our record deck, but that might just be the incentive I need.

A different sort of musical event, 1968

For now I will just reflect that Crown Woods did allow me to stage a folk concert which I guess at 17 was something given the artists who turned up.  

With that passage of time I have no idea how much they were paid.

Leaving me just to thank Chris Mentiply for permission to reproduce his copy of the LP and make a story.

And to conclude where I began that Crown Woods did really offer up the lot.

 Location; Crown Woods, Eltham

Pictures; That raw 16 year old, 1966 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Musical nights at Crown Woods from the collection of Ann Davey 1966, crown woods at southwark, 1968, Margaret Copeland Gain, and Crown Woods, the vinyl from Chris Mentiply

*The class of 68, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20class%20of%20%2768

**Crown Woods in Concert, https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/112343918748